Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an encoding method and an encoding device for a 3D (3-dimensional) video.
Description of Related Art
Generally speaking, when a 3D video is encoded or compressed, a reference frame is used to predict a current frame for finding temporal redundancy. The prediction can be achieved by executing a motion estimation, which is to find a reference macro block in a search window of the reference frame that most approximates a current macro block. The reference frame is usually stored in a memory. When the motion estimation needs to be executed, pixel data of the search window is correspondingly read from the memory. However, a frame of the 3D video may belong to one of multiple view angles, and thus the reference frame and the current frame may belong to the same view angle or different view angles. Otherwise, two reference frames are required for encoding one current frame, and one of the two reference frames belongs to the same view angle as the current frame while the other does not. That is to say, when the 3D video is encoded, pixel data of the reference frames belonging to different view angles are read from the memory, which increases the demand for a memory bandwidth. Therefore, how to reduce the demand for the memory bandwidth has become an important issue to researchers in this field.